Tag: mindfulness

Here are five steps to an amazing life. At every step, your life will get noticeably better. Put together, you’ll be experiencing perfection. This is not something made up, but the cumulative wisdom of thousands of years of the yoga tradition, now confirmed by modern science.

Step#1: Self-observation

The first step is to look inside. Before you can make any changes to how you’re living and what your mind is doing, you have to become a witness to your own self. What are you thinking, what’s your focus, what are you feeling? Track your mind’s movements and get in touch with not only your emotions but what’s behind them. Keep track of your motivations and desires and see what their outcomes are.

Take time to examine your consciousness. Silence is key for this. Focus not on external things or your endless to-do list, but just on yourself. Get to know yourself deeply.

Step#2: Self-responsibility

Once you’re looking inside, now you can start taking control of what’s going on. This is when you take the helm and direct your life to where you want it. You assume FULL responsibility for your well-being. No more victimhood. You put aside any idea that your happiness depends on anything or anyone else. You and you alone call the shots when it comes to how you’re feeling and the quality of your life.

You can read more about this in my earlier blog on the topic.

Step#3: Mindfulness

Now that you’re trying to command your mind, the first thing you need to do is to bring it to the here and now, which is a basic definition of mindfulness. Mindfulness is the portal for all higher states of consciousness. Being in the here and now is the solution to just about every form of suffering you impose on yourself.

As your mind drifts to the past, you experience melancholy and lamentation. When your mind jumps to the future, in the false hopes of future happiness, you experience anxiety, fear, and frustration. True joy begins in the now.

You can read more about this in my earlier blog on the topic.

Step#4: Dharma

Being in the here and now allows you to bring your full attention to your task at hand. This raises a key question: what should I do? This is where the concept of dharma comes in.

Dharma means your duty and essence. What’s the best you can do right now? What’s the purest expression of the best of you at this very moment?

Dharma means prioritizing your true nature and learning to balance out your different demands and responsibilities properly. It’s about being guided by values, not external goals. It’s about living your purpose.

This is one of the key components of The 3T Path. This video will help you understand the concept a little better.

Step#5: Bhakti

Lastly, and most importantly, you need transcendence. You need love. Bhakti means transcendental love and devotion. Once you’re in the here and now, living the best of you, now you can make that your spiritual practice, by connecting it all in love of God. Love is the highest expression of the soul. You know this because you’ve experienced how love makes feel great.

But love requires an object. You have to love someone. And you can only love someone to the extent they are “loveable”. That’s why, though we can all agree that love is the highest state of mind, we end up not experiencing it enough. Not many people are so loveable.

Even if you don’t understand or accept the concept of God, at least you can see the logic here. God is defined as infinitely loveable. As such, you can love Him and Her infinitely, which naturally gives you access to an infinitely high state of consciousness and bliss. As an added bonus, God, being transcendent, is always with you, so you can experience this loving connection anywhere, at any time.

Conclusion

So, there you have it: 5 steps to an amazing life. The first four will make your life flow with grace and enthusiasm. The last will take you beyond the constraints of material life, to an ocean of bliss.

In the book, The 3T Path (https://3tpath.com/books/) you can see in detail all these points, the techniques necessary to make them happen and how this can transform your life.

Watch my video on this topic here.

Look what they’re saying about The 3T Path book: “A life-saver!” – Ivan Llobet

 

Life is no walk in the park. And what bothers us the most is experiencing negative emotions, such as sadness, shame and frustration. It hurts, doesn’t it? So, how to deal with it? Here we’ll see a practical and efficient technique, with scientific confirmation, to minimize this pain.

We have two ways to deal with negative emotions. The first I emphasize in my videos and my book, “The 3T Path” (https://3tpath.com/books/): change how you deal with life, change your focus and more and more you won’t even have a reason to become hurt. This requires a profound change in how you go about your life, which I call a paradigm change – a change from the fantasy paradigm to the reality paradigm. To understand how to do this requires dedication and is better understood by reading the book. The second way is to know how to deal with the negative emotion when it comes up. This is what we’ll explain here.

Joan Rosenberg, PhD, a researcher in the field of psychology, created a system to solve this problem, which I’ll summarize here.

What are negative emotions? She proposes we have eight which dominate our lives: 1) sadness, 2) shame, 3) helplessness, 4) anger, 5) vulnerability, 6) embarrassment, 7) disappointment and 8) frustration.

Pretty bad, huh? Or not? Here’s a interesting point: why do we consider these negative emotions to be bad? Is the emotion itself bad, or is the feeling you get that is bad? Emotions are just that, emotions. They’re a thought. Something that only exists in your head. So, what’s bad about these negative emotions? The physiological reactions they generate! We don’t usually stop and think about this, but here’s a great insight: what’s unpleasant is the physical sensation generated by the negative emotion. What bothers us is the chemical changes and the changes in our digestive, respiratory and cardiological systems.

The first step Dr. Rosenberg recommends is the same I emphasize in the 3T Path: mindfulness. Be present. Don’t be afraid of the negative emotion. Don’t try to mentally run away from it. Stay there, ride it out, fully conscious of it, fully present. Don’t be a victim of the situation, be an observer.

In many cases, from the negative emotion you’ll take strength and learning to rise to new heights. Many people testify that negative emotions, traumatic situations, were the trigger for their greatest achievements. The famous self-help guru, Tony Robbins, often cites his abusive alcoholic mother as an essential force that drove him to dedicate himself to helping others and attain fantastic success and satisfaction. Victims of crimes and other forms of abuse use their trauma to build systems to protect and help others from the same violence, making the world a better place. In psychology, the term used for this is “post-traumatic growth”. Here’s a video I did on this topic a while back:

The second step is waiting 90 seconds. What? Yes, that’s right! It takes approximately 90 seconds for the physiological reactions to run their course. You don’t need so much patience or self-control. It’s only 90 seconds. Why not just repeat in your head the Hare Krishna mantra while you wait, asking Krishna to help quickly absorb the lesson to be taken from the experience? Breathe deep, relax and observe. Soon the whole experience blows off. Life goes on. Everything is fine.

Try it out yourself. The next time you feel a negative emotion rising, don’t back down, don’t cower away from it, and don’t get stressed. Stay present. Observe the physiological reactions. Wait 90 seconds, and watch your body return to its normal state. Reestablish your balance.

Now bring your focus to the solution, in the form of a constructive reaction to the situation aligned with your dharma, in divine consciousness. Learn from the situation. Create the habit of always getting something good from unpleasant things that happens to you. Immediately after a bad experience, seek out ways in which that will make you wiser, stronger and more focused.  Use the negative energy to propel you to become greater.

Watch my video on this topic here.

Yours,

Giridhari Das

Look what they’re saying about The 3T Path book: “This book is incredible! It really changed my life and will change yours too.”

Mindfulness is a modern term for one aspect of yoga practice. In short, it means to be aware, to be conscious of your consciousness, and to be able to experience a thought, sensation, or external action with your full attention. This requires a lot of practice, because most people just get lost in thought.

Research shows that we have about seventy thousand thoughts a day! Just sitting down for breakfast, you play out different imagined scenarios, engage in a non-stop mental conversation, weigh the pros and cons of this or that, replay and review the movie you saw last night, . . . In a matter of seconds your thoughts can stray from an encounter you had the other day to plans of what to do tonight to being anxious about an upcoming meeting at work. This has been going on for much of your life, and it will continue if you don’t start doing something about it.

In this video you can see a simple exercise you can practice to develop mindfulness: